10 Terrifying Prehistoric Creatures (That Weren’t Dinosaurs)

For 135 million years, dinosaurs were the undisputed rulers of the Earth, and could still have been today if not for a cataclysmic comet some 65 million years ago.

However, our planet has been around for a lot longer than the dinosaurs’ reign and, as it turns out, nature is quite adept at producing nightmare-inducing monsters. To think that dinosaurs are the only scary inhabitants of our prehistoric past would be a mistake.

From ocean-dwellers far bigger than great whites to sky-dwellers bigger than giraffes to an elephant-sized sloth, here are ten of the scariest–and most fascinating…

Titanoboa

If the movie Anaconda terrified you (and not because of J.Lo’s acting), you might want to skip this one. Simply put, Titanoboa is the largest snake that ever existed. It grew over 40 feet long and could weigh up to 2,500 pounds.

To put things in perspective, that’s almost as much as a grown giraffe weighs. Titanoboa appeared not long after the dinosaurs went extinct, perhaps filling a niche left open by the disappearance of the world’s former top predators.

But had Titanoboa and the dinosaurs coexisted, here’s how a battle between the massive snake and a T. rex might have went: